The book is a continuation of the author’s previous book, “The Substance of Literature” (M.: Languages of Slavic Culture, 2001). We are still talking about the theoretical aspects of ontologically oriented poetics, about the principles of identifying in a literary text what can be called “unreadable” in the text, or “non-obvious semantic structures.” The difference between the two books lies mainly in the material selected. In the first case, we were talking about Russian literary classics, here – about Western European classics: from the tragedies of W. Shakespeare and J. W. Goethe – to the romantic “fairy tales” of J. Barry and A. Milne. The heroes of the study are not only the characters, but also those elements of the world with which they enter into a variety of relationships: substances, shapes, volumes, sounds, directions of movement, etc. - all that constitutes the ontological (directly unreadable) background of the “visible” , an explicit plot and gradually shapes its logic and configuration.